[frostmatthew]

Each time something like this is posted to HN many are quick to come to the defense of the 10x engineer as not a myth. Since so many HNers are founders/CEOs/CTOs/whatever I wonder how many of them making comments that 10x engineers are "responsible for most of team's output" are actually paying their "rockstar" engineers ten times average.

The best baseball players make much more than the average player, the star of a Hollywood film makes far more than most actors, and true "rockstars" make a heck of a lot more money than the vast majority of musicians.

Anyone know any companies that pay their best engineers multi-million dollar salaries? (if so please let me know where to apply!)

[dexen]

> The best baseball players make much more than the average player, the star of a Hollywood film makes far more than most actors, and true "rockstars" make a heck of a lot more money than the vast majority of musicians.

It's sales and risk management problem. Given a rockstar and an aspiring novice rocker, you can sell concert tickets at 10x (or 100x) price mark when the former plays. The costs of infrastructure are high, but scale roughly with O(log(n)) which means econonmy of scale, and being rockstar means automatic, `free' marketing. It works a little bit different in the software world.

If you sell to corporate customers, it's sales and risk management (support, compatibility, etc.) problem. You need those costly sales reps. Due to risk management, corporation pay only slightly more for 10x better if it is built by small team -- they want a large, established vendor (risk management on their part). Which obviously pre-cludes all-star team. Unless you hit an acquisition jackpot :^)

If you sell software packages to consumers, it's marketing and margins problem -- there is always a middleman taking a cut; think Apple Store. Unless you become viral -- like Angry Birds did.

If you sell services to consumers, it's again marketing and scaling problem -- you'll end up needing huge backend, which means large team, which agains precludes an all-star team.

> Anyone know any companies that pay their best engineers multi-million dollar salaries? (if so please let me know where to apply!) GOOG, FB, etc. -- to the founders ;-)

[crazygringo]

Because it's notoriously difficult to measure programmer productivity, companies are generally going to be incredibly hesitant to offer "rockstar" programmers salaries that match their capabilities. There's no box office take or album sales or stadium-filling metrics to rely on.

"Rockstar" programmers generally need to go and (co-)found their own companies to make their multiples of millions. The great difficulty is that being a rockstar programmer doesn't always make you a good product/business person, and the best programming can't save a crappy business. But people like Gates and Zuckerberg are the ones who make it happen.

But if one day we find the holy grail of accurately measuring programmer productivity... (though I don't think that's possible...)

[frostmatthew]

That's another thing I've found funny...often the very same people who say measuring programmer productivity is difficult are the ones saying some devs are ten times more productive than others.